Forgiveness and Love
Gattina wrote a comment on my entry "Love Others..." a few days ago. She said,
I really admire these people having such a faith in god. But I think even people without any believe also could do that. In my opinion you don't have to be a christian and believe in god to be a good and selfishless human. It depends on your character. I think nobody would know himself enough to know the way he would react in such a situation.
Gattina—I think you are right, in some ways.
I think it is entirely possible for people who don’t necessarily believe in God to be good, generous, compassionate, and forgiving. And it is true that no one knows how he would react in a situation like this. But I believe the circumstances here are unusual—the Amish families' forgiveness and the older girl’s self-sacrifice, both. In both, I see great acts of love, beyond what the usual person could give.
I believe average people, believers or not, would have a very difficult time forgiving a man who murdered their children. Believers and nonbelievers both struggle with the need to forgive.
We have a fairly easy time forgiving people when they cheat us in games, when they cut in front of us in traffic, if they talk behind our backs, and maybe even if they are unfaithful in marriage. But the death of a child is one of the very hardest things to deal with—we are supposed to die before our children do. We are not supposed to have to outlive them, especially because of murder. When they forgave Charles Carl Roberts, they sacrificed their self-serving desire to lash out at his family, to hate him. That's what most people would have done.
And the thirteen-year-old girl who offered herself, in hopes that the younger girls might be saved—I believe such acts of selfless sacrifice come from the heart of God. It reminds me of the self-sacrifice of the character Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in exchange for the life of Charles Darnay, for the love of his family. It reminds me of God’s sacrifice of Jesus, in exchange for our deserved punishment, for love of us.
First John 3:20 says, “For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” And verse 23 says, “this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us." Chapter 4, verse 10 says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” And verse 12 says, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
Unconditional, sacrificial love is powerful. To be able to love like that takes great faith in God and comprehension of his love. We are called to love the way God does—to love people regardless of the return, regardless of how we are treated.
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